#learn parametric

[miled72]

In this third part of the Grasshopper series on attractors for beginners, we will learn about another component called Curve Closest Point, another alternative way to have attractor points affecting your shape. I recommend you also watch the first two videos in the series to have a better understanding about the attractors' logic, even though this video, by itself alone, presents a good explanation on its own. In the video description, you can find the links for the other two videos, also a link to download the demo file used in the second part that I used as a starting point for this tutorial.

[surajbarthy]

[3045] scarlet 

[bmpmp3]

whenever i get in some kinda vocal synthesizer mood i feel so bad for anyone trying to talk to me because i get so lost in the zone and im just sitting there so silently smiling so deep in thought and people ask what im thinking so hard about and i have to be like. well. i am thinking,, about

,phonemes.

[farmerstrend]

Global Collaboration for Local Impact: How LM Re, Sprout, and Britam are Supporting Kenyan Coffee Growers Against Drought

Liberty Mutual Reinsurance (LM Re) has announced a partnership with Insurtech firm Sprout, Inc and Kenyan financial services company Britam to introduce a new parametric insurance product aimed at protecting Kenyan coffee growers from financial losses caused by drought. This new product, developed through collaboration at the Lloyd’s Lab Launchpad Pitch, is designed to provide swift payouts…

[cybereliasacademy]

HyperTransformer: G Additional Tables and Figures

Subscribe .tade0b48c-87dc-4ecb-b3d3-8877dcf7e4d8 { color: #fff; background: #222; border: 1px solid transparent; border-radius: undefinedpx; padding: 8px 21px; } .tade0b48c-87dc-4ecb-b3d3-8877dcf7e4d8.place-top { margin-top: -10px; } .tade0b48c-87dc-4ecb-b3d3-8877dcf7e4d8.place-top::before { content: “”; background-color: inherit; position: absolute; z-index: 2; width: 20px; height: 12px; }…

[homunculus-argument]

I was doom scrolling your page and saw a lot of stuff about Finland

do you live there or were you like born there and moved?? of you have lived in a different place, how different was it?

Oh, I'm a native, born and raised here. The reason I'm seemingly implausibly fluent in english is a combination of random factors, both odd and not that odd. When I was like 3-4 or so, mom put me into an english-speaking daycare for a while so that I could pick up the language properly when she noticed that I was learning to understand english faster than I was learning to read subtitles on TV (unlike in many other countries, finnish TV is never dubbed save for children's cartoons).

Both of my parents needed english for their jobs - my father was an IT wizard and my mother an international sales agent - so they were both fluent and understood just how important knowing the lingua franca du jour is going to be in an increasingly international world. The fact that they were willing to put this much thought into our future wellbeing but I was still bullied at school for being filthy because nobody kept an eye on my hygiene probably illustrates what kind of a odd mish-mash of being neglected, materially spoiled and randomly well-provided for my childhood was.

Then I turned 11 and was allowed to free-roam unsupervised on the internet. This was back when "grammar nazi" was a scalding insult and not a government job title, so whenever I got into arguments on the internet with strangers who had no idea they were arguing with a child, aggressively correcting the opponent's grammar was considered a winning move. My grasp of english grammar rules was honed on the brutal battlefields of obscure 2005-2010 forums with no sympathy for angry teenagers with an undiagnosed Something Wrong With Them.

So I am not "officially" bilingual by many formal parametres since neither of my parents were native speakers, but the same standards also don't recognise "the living room TV" as a parental figure, or consider "feral child abandoned into the wild who was found and raised by a wild pack of internet strangers" a valid backstory.

[andmaybegayer]

Are there any primitives or operations you wished parametric CAD software had?

This is tricky, because parametric CAD is what I learned to design on so its feature set feels "natural".

I don't really think so! Most of the obvious innovations are already covered, SolidWorks can take a model back and forth between parametric and primitives modelling in its own weird way, Inventor has really great design for manufacture features, from what I've seen SolidEdge has done some clever stuff with the solver to help you design parts that are customizable as you go down the chain. Who knows what's going on in NX these days, not me. There's definitely some holes in the sense of individual packages lacking features, but almost anything you can ask has been implemented somewhere, by someone.

Good quality design for manufacture tools really do help, I remember doing sheet metal stuff in Inventor back before they cut off free Inventor access and being able to see your generated sheet and bend allowances so clearly was great, and now even OnShape has pretty solid design helpers.

A thing small shops and hobbyists would probably like is better handling of point clouds and photogrammetry for matching parts, since you're much more likely to be working with parts and projects where you didn't do all the design, I've spent many hours trying to accurately model a mating feature, but even that's like. Pretty good these days, importing 3D scans into an editor is pretty standard and the good CAD packages will even let you pick up holes and clean up point clouds directly from the scan.

I'm not that much of a mech eng, and never really was, my CAD is mostly self taught for simple tasks, real mechanical designers no doubt have better opinions on this, @literallymechanical probably has thoughts on T-splines.

[bayesic-bitch]

Old-school planning vs new-school learning is a false dichotomy

I wanted to follow up on this discussion I was having with @metamatar, because this was getting from the original point and justified its own thread. In particular, I want to dig into this point

rule based planners, old school search and control still outperform learning in many domains with guarantees because end to end learning is fragile and dependent on training distribution. Lydia Kavraki's lab recently did SIMD vectorisation to RRT based search and saw like a several hundred times magnitude jump for performance on robot arms – suddenly severely hurting the case for doing end to end learning if you can do requerying in ms. It needs no signal except robot start, goal configuration and collisions. Meanwhile RL in my lab needs retraining and swings wildly in performance when using a slightly different end effector.

In general, the more I learn about machine learning and robotics, the less I believe that the dichotomies we learn early on actually hold up to close scrutiny. Early on we learn about how support vector machines are non-parametric kernel methods, while neural nets are parametric methods that update their parameters by gradient descent. And this is true, until you realize that kernel methods can be made more efficient by making them parametric, and large neural networks generalize because they approximate non-parametric kernel methods with stationary parameters. Early on we learn that model-based RL learns a model that it uses for planning, while model free methods just learn the policy. Except that it's possible to learn what future states a policy will visit and use this to plan without learning an explicit transition function, using the TD learning update normally used in model-free RL. And similar ideas by the same authors are the current state-of-the-art in offline RL and imitation learning for manipulation Is this model-free? model-based? Both? Neither? does it matter?

In my physics education, one thing that came up a lot is duality, the idea that there are typically two or more equivalent representations of a problem. One based on forces, newtonian dynamics, etc, and one as a minimization* problem. You can find the path that light will take by knowing that the incoming angle is always the same as the outgoing angle, or you can use the fact that light always follows the fastest* path between two points.

I'd like to argue that there's a similar but underappreciated analog in AI research. Almost all problems come down to optimization. And in this regard, there are two things that matter -- what you're trying to optimize, and how you're trying to optimize it. And different methods that optimize approximately the same objective see approximately similar performance, unless one is much better than the other at doing that optimization. A lot of classical planners can be seen as approximately performing optimization on a specific objective.

Let me take a specific example: MCTS and policy optimization. You can show that the Upper Confidence Bound algorithm used by MCTS is approximately equal to regularized policy optimization. You can choose to guide the tree search with UCB (a classical bandit algorithm) or policy optimization (a reinforcement learning algorithm), but the choice doesn't matter much because they're optimizing basically the same thing. Similarly, you can add a state occupancy measure regularization to MCTS. If you do, MCTS reduces to RRT in the case with no rewards. And if you do this, then the state-regularized MCTS searches much more like a sampling-based motion planner instead of like the traditional UCB-based MCTS planner. What matters is really the objective that the planner was trying to optimize, not the specific way it was trying to optimize it.

For robotics, the punchline is that I don't think it's really the distinction of new RL method vs old planner that matters. RL methods that attempt to optimize the same objective as the planner will perform similarly to the planner. RL methods that attempt to optimize different objectives will perform differently from each other, and planners that attempt to optimize different objectives will perform differently from each other. So I'd argue that the brittleness and unpredictability of RL in your lab isn't because it's RL persay, but because standard RL algorithms don't have long-horizon exploration term in their loss functions that would make them behave similarly to RRT. If we find a way to minimize the state occupancy measure loss described in the above paper other theory papers, I think we'll see the same performance and stability as RRT, but for a much more general set of problems. This is one of the big breakthroughs I'm expecting to see in the next 10 years in RL.

*okay yes technically not always minimization, the physical path can can also be an inflection point or local maxima, but cmon, we still call it the Principle of Least Action.

[miled72]

Please watch the first part if you never used the Closest Point component before: https://youtu.be/Js5-fgpAPUQ Files used in the first video can be downloaded here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-SUfsHZSCIHAxBVbIZ0jCM00C5PS5mg3/view?usp=sharing In this second part, we will add the Remap Numbers components to map the original distance range into a new custom range, where we control the minimum and maximum move amount on the Y-axis. Please watch until the end to get a full explanation of the process.

[justjasper]

Creation of the Pan Flag

Copied (with grammar/spelling mistakes) from my twitter thread about it for posterity.

I was going to do this for Pride weekend but you know, life, so: I wanted to talk about a thing. I created the #pansexual flag, a thread.

Back in 2010, I was 20 and tumblr was my main social playground. I was active in various spheres, and I was learning.

I'd been IDing as bi since I was 13, but moved away from bi as an identifier and took up pansexual soon after discovering the term, bc I felt it fit better.

This is mainly bc the simplicity of pan being defined as attraction to any/all genders was extremely appealing to someone really coming into this new way of expressing their orientation like tumblr allowed. It felt right for how I wanted to relate to and express my orientation.

The bi communities I had access too often saw heavy discussion related to attraction parametres of "bi" - convos at the time I didn't really recognise for what they were: bi people working hard to define bisexuality on their terms, tackling intra-community transphobia, (cont)

(cont) and developing within a social space where more expansive gender experiences and identities were becomes more well known and understood.

My switch of labels was about finding something that felt truly right for me, but it would be dishonest to pretend the decision wasn't impacted by the politics and "discourse" I was involved in at the time.

There was no popular pan flag, and the offerings were frankly... ugly. To me. Various shades of purple, P letters, P symbols incorporating gender symbols, infinity symbols. They didn't feel consistent with the other pride flags.

So on a whim, I decided to design one. I designed it to be pretty, honestly. That was a primary function of it, to have s/t I liked to represent my identity. No point pretending I was trying to be super innovative and deep: I wanted something pretty to plaster on my blog.

Pink, yellow, blue. A strong magenta, a strong gold yellow, and a light cerulean. The pink not too purple, the yellow not too bright, the blue not too cyan. Hex FF1B8D, FFD900, 1BB2FF.

Pink and blue, because of their gendered traditions, and yellow, a generally non-gendered colour, to represent nonbinary folks etc.

I created it anonymously, on a side blog away from my main handle. I was already running LGBTLaughs which was proving very popular in tumblr and didn't want to monopolise queer blog space, I suppose.

I didn't expect it to take off. It proved popular on tumblr, and for a few years the flag kept getting added to the Wikipedia 'pansexual' page and then removed. Eventually it snowballed and ended up in use well beyond tumblr.

As I've got older I've realised a lot of people would be interested in knowing this part of modern queer history, and more about modern flag creation in general, and that it's worth documenting. Not for credit so much as for posterity.

So, that's that. The first time I saw a pansexual flag in real life at my city's Pride parade I may have had a little cry.

Twitter Drama

Best viewed on the original twitter thread, for the full documentation (I may update this with fuller documentation down the line) but here's a rundown of drama surrounding the flag.

First, to set the stage:

posted about designing the pan flag

said i was cool with bi/pan lesbians

said i was cool with kink at pride

Thus followed, in varying intensity 2020-2022:

misgendering

suicide bait

general harassment/pile-on

"called out" on r/pansexuals

blasted on sapphics for satan (fb)

now sworn enemy of of lesbian kpop avi twitter

claims the original pan flag was transphobic in meaning

multiple "new" pan flags designed to displace the one i designed

claims i stole the flag from a medieval indian kingdom, and subsequent vandalisation of wikipedia for the actual state of kerala

vandalisation of the wiki page for the pan flag, resulting in it having to be locked

[surajbarthy]

[3043] race rat

[max1461]

I'm just not in an environment that's conducive to my wellbeing, and I don't know how to get back into one. It's really that simple; obviously I could elaborate more but I think that makes the problem less clear. I'm an idiosyncratic person in certain ways, with idiosyncratic needs. But that's sort of beside the point, talking too much about my idiosyncrasies gives the false impression that the locus of the problem is internal, which I don't think it is. Most of my idiosyncrasies are things I like about myself, and beyond that, many of the features of my environment which are bothering me are not doing so for particularly idiosyncratic reasons!

So, all in all, that's really all there is to it. I'm in an environment that's not conducive to my wellbeing, and I don't know how to get into a better one at this point. I was happy in college, when I was constantly learning and surrounded by a large number of new and interesting people to meet. Now I'm lonely and bored, not enough people and not enough learning. I could go into more detail but I don't think it's necessary, I don't think it's productive. I just want to be in a better environment again. The rest, you know, any other things that are bothering me I can figure out on my own. But I don't know how to get back into an environment where it feels like what I'm doing day-to-day is basically, you know, pleasant and worthwhile.

Obviously I've tried going to grad school, which... has sort of worked? But wasn't quite what I had expected in various ways. So I'm not really sure what to do.

No one online can give me the answer obviously, what I need is like. A search strategy, or a parametrized family of options that I can look through, to evaluate each for the more subtle factors that contribute to my sense of wellbeing. I just lack a search strategy. I just need a search strategy.

[mass-convergence]

Heres the thing: I used to watch scifi movies and basically make fun of the shitty science the entire runtime like it was a real time cinemasins episode.

But idk, now I’m like “fuck it” because it’s not worth it to point out every glaring inaccuracy. No, tornadoes don’t sound like they’re actual creatures roaring at you… but it’s called sound design. It’s supposed to sound threatening and ominous and like it’s about to maul you because it’s a tornado. That’s the sound design team doing their goddamn jobs.

Yeah you’re not going to put multimillion dollar portable parametric radars in the path of a tornado. That’s incredibly risky, a horrible waste of resources, and probably wouldn’t get you good data anyway. You also wouldn’t like be able to stop a tornado with glorified cat litter. But that’s not the point. If you want to stop that EF-5 from destroying El Reno and taking out Glen Powell in the process: you damn well drive that pick up truck with that trailer full of magical polymer into that sucker and tame a tornado.

If you tried to make a movie like Twisters actually emulate a legit scientific field campaign I wouldn’t exactly call the movie boring. Honestly, given half the shit that happens on field campaigns: they’d have a lot of material to work with...

But it wouldn’t be terribly cinematic and dramatic with super high stakes. It would be like “this group of underpaid undergrads are now stuck in Hays, Kansas for a week because a ridge of high pressure set up over the area and zero storms are happening. See what hijinks they get up to!” (Never been on a field campaign but I’ve heard some stories)

Right now there’s a major field campaign happening that deals with studying hail in the plains. As much as that research is important and really really neat … I would not want to watch a movie dramatizing that (documentary would be neat though).

Basically: you don’t watch Hollywood movies to learn science, you watch them to be entertained. And damn if seeing an asteroid blowing up, a group of individuals with extremely distinctive personality traits drilling into the center of the earth, or a bickering divorced science couple trying to put a probe in front of a tornado isn’t incredibly entertaining. They’re not cinematic masterpieces but boy are they still fun to watch.

[ruminate88]

Healing and Accepting Yourself 🌹

1/15/25 learning to love yourself

First off, I’ve never felt comfortable to say “I love myself” cuz I’ve always had the mindset I have to be “humble” but self-loathing is bad and is a real thing. I’ve hated myself too long!! In my past, I would pull on my hair almost to pull it out 😓 I felt sooooo ugly and worthless.

The way I wouldn’t eat but then suddenly I’m shoving a bag of chips down my throat till I’m too full. Also, I only drank mountain dew back then 😝 also was drowning myself in porn trying to make myself “feel better”. That’s all real and so unhealthy. Also I was unknowingly in toxic relationships… I never knew anything about emotional abuse. Never even heard of it. I knew the men I talked to online were “opinionated” and seemingly have all this “advice” to give me but noooow I understand it was criticism ❤️‍🩹 I thought getting all the attention from those men was fun or good but yet they ultimately all hurt me in same way. Attention is not love and sadly it was negative attention as these men objectify me and treat me disrespectfully. (I allowed it)

I wore too much makeup back then. Often wore black and grey eyeshadow trying to feel pretty but I was truly emo. Especially when I was talking to my ex Andrew, the way he had me anxious and on egg shells constantly. I put on so much dark eyeshadow that a dear lady I love says to me, “sweetie, you’re too pretty for all that dark eyeshadow” 🥺🌹 she’s sooo sweet I know she loves me but I was so hard on myself!!!

Sadly I wanted the approval of these men to validate if I’m pretty or good enough because I think they’re extremely handsome men and so smart cuz of being in college (one of them had countless awards) HAH 💔😢 but they invalidate me and put me down. They get my nudes, talk dirty to me but yet shove me away and make me feel so bad. The way they seemingly “hate me” and I feel it deep down until I believe it and so I hate myself too 🌹

On this journey I’m learning I’ve gotta accept myself. Flaws and all. Accept what happened and how it changed me. Yes, it changed me. I see the world much different now. I’m becoming “self aware” but doesn’t mean I know it all and am suddenly perfect haha I’m just aware of my problems and areas of where I need help. Where I’ve went wrong in the past and how I can learn from my mistakes ❤️‍🩹❤️‍🩹❤️‍🩹🌹

I’ve since gotten in a healthier relationship, now I eat a little better, I’ve given up all Mountain Dew/pop and I’m not anxious like I was but nothing is fixed over night. I’m actively trying to understand myself and my past. Trying to learn lessons and grow. Some days all I can take is a baby step and then other days I find I can take bigger steps ❤️‍🩹🌹 Gotta be patient with yourself!

I hope whoever finds this that you also are taking better care of yourself too and learning to accept yourself. YOU HAVE TO FORGIVE YOURSELF! 🙏🏻 It’s easy for me to cheer others on but not do the same for me. I’ve never been my own cheerleader before 😝 it’s weird but I’m trying!! Also, I know I’m at a place where I’m struggling to share my feelings with anyone close to me ❤️‍🩹❤️‍🩹❤️‍🩹🌹 I know I need to open up more 🥺 I will in time! One day at a time ❤️‍🩹🌹

[cybereliasacademy]

HyperTransformer: A Example of a Self-Attention Mechanism For Supervised Learning

Subscribe .t9ce7d96b-e3c9-448d-b1fd-97f643ade4ab { color: #fff; background: #222; border: 1px solid transparent; border-radius: undefinedpx; padding: 8px 21px; } .t9ce7d96b-e3c9-448d-b1fd-97f643ade4ab.place-top { margin-top: -10px; } .t9ce7d96b-e3c9-448d-b1fd-97f643ade4ab.place-top::before { content: “”; background-color: inherit; position: absolute; z-index: 2; width: 20px; height: 12px; }…

[homunculus-argument]

If you met someone who was really into, like, idk, elevators, you'd probably first assume that this person is someone who's not only knowledgeable about a wild range of elevators, can name 15 different types of elevators (and the major subtypes of all of them, and all of them have like 10 subtypes and there's more structural nuances than that), is interested in trying out - or at least learning more about - any new type of elevator they hear of, and if you ask them to name their favourite type of elevator, they'd think of so many that they have a hard time choosing just one, and even if they have several least favourite types, that's way less than half the length of the list of the ones they like the best.

If you asked a geologist what their favourite kind of rocks are, they'd start listing them out by cathegories, there's so many different types and they're all really cool and interesting in their own ways. Someone who's really into birds is probably going to have a favourite kind of corvid, owl, parrot and some branches of birds you've never heard of. Everyone who's really into some specific subject generally has a hard time picking their favourite type, because so many kinds are cool in such different ways. And if you know of some different one that they've never heard of, they're intrigued to learn more.

Straight-up nobody who's truly, genuinely, passionately into the subject they claim to be really into will tell you "actually there is just one specific type that's good, these are the exact parametres of what they must be within, and anything that isn't within this narrow range is trash that I hate." This isn't a fan or an enthusiast, but a snob. And probably a poser, who doesn't even really like the thing in general but for some reason would rather present themselves as an expert with a refined taste, than just admitting that they don't actually really even like the thing in general all that much.

I don't get what the kind of men who claim to be some sort of Paragon Manliest Heterosexual Man try to achieve by boasting about how picky they are about women. Like oh, the only women who are even passably attractive to you are within this exact 3-year age range, within these height and weight ranges, education level, religious beliefs, political ideals, and so on? Yeah sorry but you're clearly far less into women than the dude who'll go full Johnny Bravo at any female figure he encounters and is currently shagging women beyond your comprehension.